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History of Apple: The story of Steve Jobs and the company he founded

In this feature we tell the story of Apple. We start with the early days, the tale of how Apple was founded, moving on through the Apple I, to the Apple II, the launch of the Macintosh and the revolution in the DTP industry… To the tech-industry behemoth that we know and love today.

So sit back as we take a stroll down memory lane. Why not brush up on what really happened before you go and watch the Steve Jobs movie , with its interesting interpretations of several important events in the company’s history?

On 1 April 1976 Apple was founded, making the company 41 years old as of the 1 April 2017 – here’s a historical breakdown of the company.

The history of Apple

Our Apple history feature includes information about The foundation of Apple and the years that followed, we look at How Jobs met Woz and Why Apple was named Apple. The Apple I and The debut of the Apple II. Apple’s visit to Xerox, and the one-button mouse. The story of The Lisa versus the Macintosh. Apple’s ‘1984’ advert, directed by Ridley Scott. The Macintosh and the DTP revolution. Read more: The Mac’s Birthday .

We go on to examine what happened between Jobs and Sculley, leading to Jobs departure from Apple, and what happened during The wilderness years: when Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple, including Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise and how Apple teamed up with IBM and Motorola and eventually Microsoft. And finally, The return of Jobs to Apple.

The foundation of Apple

The history of everyone’s favourite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

The two Steves –  Jobs and Wozniak  – may have been Apple’s most visible founders, but were it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iPhone , iPad or iMac today. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling for just $500 a holding that would have been worth $72bn 40 years later.

How Jobs met Woz

Jobs and Woz (that’s Steve Wozniak) were introduced in 1971 by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, who went on to become one of Apple’s earliest employees. The two Steves got along thanks to their shared love of technology and pranks.

Jobs and Wozniak joined forces, initially coming up with pranks such as rigging up a painting of a hand showing the middle-finger to be displayed during a graduaction ceremony at Jobs’ school, and a call to the Vatican that nearly got them access to the Pope.

The two friends were also using their technology know-how to build ‘blue boxes’ that made it possible to make long distance phone calls for free.

Jobs and Wozniak worked together on the Atari arcade game Breakout while Jobs was working at Atari and Wozniak was working at HP – Jobs had roped Woz into helping him reduce the number of logic chips required. Jobs managed to get a good bonus for the work on Breakout, of which he gave a small amount to Woz.

The first Apple computer

The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California’s Menlo Park from 1975. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there – which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards – and was inspired by MITS’ build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. This philosophy continues to shine through in Apple’s products today.

So Woz produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn’t trying to change the world with what he’d produced – he just wanted to show off how much he’d managed to do with so few resources.

Speaking to NPR (National Public Radio) in 2006, Woz explained that “When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter – it should have a keyboard – and the output device is a TV set, it wasn’t really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer.”

Jobs and Woz

It almost didn’t happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality – he’s funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars – but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers.” He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.

Let’s be thankful he didn’t. Jobs saw Woz’s computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator (which cost a bit more than calculators do today!), and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.

Why Apple was named Apple

The name Apple was to cause Apple problems in later years as it was uncomfortably similar to that of the Beatles’ publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough.

Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984 , Woz credited Jobs with the idea. “He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned.”

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

The name also likely benefitted by beginning with an A, which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings.

The Apple Logo

There are other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple. The idea that it was named thus because Newton was inspired when an Apple fell out of a tree hitting him on the head, is backed up by the fact that the original Apple logo was a rather complicated illustration of Newton sitting under a tree.

Later the company settled on the bite out of an Apple design for Apple’s logo – a far simpler logo design. These logos are probably the reason for other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple, with some suggesting that the Apple logo with a chunk taken out of it is a nod at computer scientist and Enigma code-breaker, Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide infused apple.

However, according to Rob Janoff , the designer who created the logo, the Turing connection is simply “ a wonderful urban legend.”

Equally the bite taken out of the Apple could represent the story of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament. The idea being that the Apple represents knowledge.

Selling the Apple I

Woz built each computer by hand, and although he’d wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts – at a price at that would recoup their outlay as long as they shipped 50 units – Jobs had bigger ideas.

Jobs inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. This meant that once the store had taken its cut, the Apple I sold for $666.66 – the legend is that Wozniak liked repeating numbers and was unaware of the ‘number of the beast’ conection. 

Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn’t exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend’s father, it wasn’t enough.

In the end, it was Byte Shop’s purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography , he convinced Cramer’s manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order.

“Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.”

An original Apple I (in a case)

Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it’s ultimately this that saw him duck out.

“Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together,”  Wayne told NextShark in 2013 . “If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes.”

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they’d been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.

As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom , “Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn’t even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn’t have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn’t be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case.”

An original Apple I board, from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection

Raspberry PI and the BBC’s Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, “Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.” The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.

Their scarcity has made them collectors’ items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren’t that deep, Briel Computers’  Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.

When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth – so much so that the decision to build a successor can’t have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.

The Apple II

The success of the first Apple computer meant that Apple was able to go on to design its predecessor.

The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like the Apple computer before it, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.

Yes, the Apple II (or apple ][ as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson , credits with launching the personal computer industry.

The trouble is, the specs alone weren’t really enough to justify the $1,300 cost of the Apple II. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn’t until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world’s first ‘killer app’.

The first app on an Apple computer: Visicalc

Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised  “a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations…”

Of course, we’d recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things existed only on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.

Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today – in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today? Here’s our Numbers review .)

The technological limitations inherent in the hardware meant that it didn’t quite work as Bricklin had first imagined. The Apple II didn’t have an incorporated display and although the mouse had been invented it wasn’t bundled with the machine. So, the display became the regular screen, and the mouse was swapped out for the Apple II’s game paddle, which Bricklin described as being “a dial you could turn to move game objects back and forth… you could move the cursor left or right, and then push the ‘fire’ button, and then turning the paddle would move the cursor up and down.”

It was far from perfect and working this way was sluggish, so Bricklin reverted to using the left and right arrow keys, with the space bar in place of the fire button for switching between horizontal and vertical movement.

VisiCalc was unveiled in 1979 and described as “a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations”. We owe it a debt of gratitude for the part it played in driving sales of the Apple II and anchoring Apple within the industry.

Writing in Morgan Stanley’s Electronics Letter , shortly before its launch, analyst Benjamin M Rosen expounded his belief that VisiCalc was “so powerful, convenient, universal, simple to use and reasonably priced that it could well become one of the largest-selling personal computer programs ever… [it] could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.”

How right he was, as Tim Barry revealed in a later InfoWorld piece in which he described an experience that would have been familiar to many:

“When I first used VisiCalc on an Apple II, I wanted to get a version that could take advantage of the larger system capabilities of my CP/M computer. Alas it was not to be… We ended up buying an Apple II just to run VisiCalc (a fairly common reason for many Apple sales, I’m told).”

Apple itself credited the app with being behind a fifth of all series IIs it sold.

Apple II success: colour graphics

So a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn’t have been a success if it hadn’t adhered to the company’s already established high standards.

The February 1984 edition of PC Mag , looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that “its packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator’s hobby. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from … computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard.”

More radically, though, the Apple II  “was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics… contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered.”

In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century – before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.

Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.

For VisiCalc, the future wasn’t so bright, largely because its developers weren’t quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc’s developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc – it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.

That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.

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Apple, Xerox and the one-button mouse

Apple has never been slow to innovate – except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We’re approaching the eighties in our trip through the company’s history and we’re at the point where it’s followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh?

The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry’s biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.

The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.

Xerox had established a research centre there – Xerox PARC, now simply called ‘parc’ – where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. Its work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers (we aren’t just talking about photocopiers!) Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.

The Apple I,  II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days’ access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.

To say this was a bargain would be a massive understatement. Apple has split its stock four times since then – in 1987, 2000, 2005 and 2014. Companies do this when the price of a single share starts to get too high, in an effort to stimulate further trading. So, assuming Xerox held on to those shares, it would have had 200,000 by 1987, 400,000 by 2000 and 800,000 by 2005. The split in 2014 was rated at seven to one, so Xerox’s holding would leap from 800,000 to 5.6m. Selling them at today’s prices would rake in $708m (£450m). Not bad for a three-day tour.

Jobs was bowled over by the Xerox Alto, a machine used widely throughout the park, with a portrait display and graphical interface, which was way ahead of its time. It had been knocking around for a while by then, but Xerox, which built 2000 units, hadn’t been selling it to the public. It wasn’t small – about the size of an under-counter fridge – but it was still considered a ‘personal’ machine, which was driven home by the user-centric manner in which it was used. It was the first computer to major on mouse use, with a three-button gadget used to point at and click on objects on the screen.

Jobs decreed that every computer Apple produced from that point on should adopt a similar way of working. Speaking to Walter Isaacson some years later, he described the revelation as “like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

The Lisa and the Macintosh

It kicked off a race inside Apple between the teams developing the Lisa and the Macintosh.

Jeff Raskin

The official line at the time was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, and the fact it was Jobs’ daughter’s name was purely coincidental. It was a high-end business machine slated to sell at close to $10,000. Convert that to today’s money and it would buy you a mid-range family car. The project was managed by John Couch, formerly of IBM.

Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.

Whichever team got their first, Apple – as a company – wanted them to do it at a price that wasn’t prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto’s mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was a one-button mouse (which maybe hasn’t stood the test of time as well as Jobs might have expected, with most of us regularly requiring that ctrl-click or right-click).

Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa’s development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.

The Apple Lisa had an advanced gui

Michael Scott was Apple’s president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.

Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.

Named in honour of Raskin’s favourite edible apple (the McIntosh ), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn’t stop him making extensive changes though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.

However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs – technically – ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the Lisa.

It was a pyrrhic victory, though. The Macintosh, which we’ll be covering in more detail below, was a success, and Apple’s current computer line-up – iOS devices aside – descends directly from that first consumer machine.

You can’t say the same of the Lisa. It cost four times the price of the Macintosh, and although it had a higher resolution display and could address more memory, it wasn’t nearly as successful. Apple released seven applications for it, covering all of the usual business bases, but third party support was poor.

Nonetheless, Apple didn’t give up. The original Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, which cost around half the price of its predecessor and used the same 3.5in disks as the Macintosh. Then, in 1985, it rebranded the hard drive-equipped Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL and stimulated sales with a price cut.

At this point, though, the numbers didn’t add up, and the Lisa had to go. The Macintosh went on to define the company.

By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable machines, they hadn’t captured the public imagination to the same degree as their predecessors. Apple needed another hit, both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had largely ignored.

That hit, we all now know, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company’s future.

If you’d like a visual guide to Apple history take a look at our Apple timeline in pictures and video

All change: Jef Raskin versus Steve Jobs

The Macintosh

We’ll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 – two years after Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 – before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but this was tweaked to avoid infringing copyright), but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he’d originally envisaged.

Raskin’s early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple (he is Vice President of Software Technology), that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.

They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they’d already laid much of the groundwork for Apple’s own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.

If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it’s unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did – and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.

The Macintosh project: Simpler and smarter

Through several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.

The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it’s not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 – Apple’s fully graphical operating system.

The Macintosh project: good looks

But it wasn’t just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic – but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.

There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn’t have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.

Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We’ve dropped the ‘System’ monicker in favour of ‘OS’ (which stands for Operating System), but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, at least in the UK, but the name lives on for many users).

(You’d be surprised by how many people are confused by the fact that Apple still referrs to the Option key on the Mac keyboard even though on UK keyboards that key is known as Alt, find out more here : What is Option on a Mac?)

The Macintosh project: pixels

The hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, and Susan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.

Susan Kare and the Command logo she designed

It’s Kare that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac – among others – as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it’s used to denote a National Heritage site – not a campsite as has been reported.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today – albeit in finer forms.

The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn’t cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.

Apple’s ‘1984’ advert

Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI – graphical user interface – to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform.

Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.

You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from.

But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.

Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.

He put in a call to ChiatDay, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios in the UK, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.

The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.

International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.

So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.

Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and ChiatDay turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it’s considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age ‘s list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.

Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking ChiatDay to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.

One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. ChiatDay offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.

As Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, “Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. ‘I think we ought to go for it,’ he told his team.”

Thank goodness they did.

There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.

Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn’t have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.

The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company’s future, and kicked off a line of computers that’s still with us today – albeit in a very different configuration.

It’s perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.

‘Lemmings’ once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for – and a switch to Macintosh Office.

It wasn’t a great success. As sterndesign’s Apple Matters explains, the advert “left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea.”

Wired put it succinctly: “Apple fell flat on its face… People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence – something very different from the cheers that greeted ‘1984’ a year earlier.”

The Macintosh and the DTP revolution

The Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs’ spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic ‘1984’ advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][, if it was really going to thrive. It found it in the shape of PageMaker, backed up by the revolutionary Apple LaserWriter printer.

The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 – just over a year after the Macintosh – was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood – the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh – running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.

It wasn’t the first laser printer – just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player – but, in true Apple style, it was different , and that’s what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.

It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.

As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, “Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer.”

So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing – so far – was the software.

Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term ‘Desktop Publishing’, heard of Apple’s intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac’s graphical interface and the printer’s high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.

The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn’t see again until we all started reading online.

Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work – which is perhaps why it’s favoured by so many designers today. It’s hard to believe, in an age where we’re used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.

By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m – an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe .

PageMaker versus QuarkXPress

But good things don’t last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).

Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.

Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.

Quark versus InDesign

Of course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story to anyone in publishing. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of InDesign and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.

PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here .

InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.

Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.

Jobs vs Sculley

It’s all been good news so far in our story of Apple’s founding and early development. We’re still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it’s offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.

To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.

Steve Jobs may have been Apple’s most public face, and the co-founder of the company, but he wasn’t its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn’t yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he’d acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple’s initial investors, but he didn’t want to run the company long term.

When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking ‘Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?’

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley’s reminiscences: ‘I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.’

That’s exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, ‘At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others’ sentences.’

Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it’s perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn’t like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.

From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.

Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn’t enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.

That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn’t helped by a downturn in the company’s fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn’t hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.

That’s exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 – just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.

Talking to the BBC in 2012 , Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: “When the Macintosh Office [Apple’s office-wide computing environment including networked Macintosh computers, file server, and a laser printer] was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn’t afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings – not just to cover the Mac’s problems. That’s what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.”

But Jobs wasn’t ready to go without a fight.

Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.

The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs’ fate was sealed.

Jobs leaves Apple

Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple’s chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.

This wasn’t Jobs’ style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that’s what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.

If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.

DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue , “Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run.”

So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we’ll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months. Read next: 12 Apple execs you need to know

Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve Jobs

The most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn’t entirely unexpected – and the news wasn’t greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs’ departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple’s Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line – particularly at a time when the company’s focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.

Apple post-Jobs (the first time)

In the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn’t be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.

However, with Jobs now busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should – in theory – deliver similar or higher profits.

The policy had its own nickname, ’55 or die’, which was a nod to Gassée’s dictat that the Macintosh II should deliver at least 55% profit per machine, perhaps explains why it was so expensive. A basic system with a 20MB hard drive (insufficient to hold an average Photoshop file today) started at $5500, but bumping up the spec, with a colour display, more memory and larger hard drive, could easily see the price double.

When stood against their PC counterparts, then, Apple’s new computers looked pretty expensive, but they had several benefits that kept their users loyal – in particular, the user interface. It’s important to remember that although Windows may be ubiquitous today, that wasn’t always the case.

When the Macintosh II first appeared in 1987, Windows was less than two years old, still at version 1.04, and still an add-on to DOS rather than a full-blown, stand-alone operating system.

Once the designers of the mid-1980s had got used to working visually, they didn’t want to go back to using a text-based computer, so until Windows hit the big time, which happened with Windows 3 at the end of the 1980s, Apple had the graphical market pretty much to itself.

Apple gets colourful: the Machintosh II ships with a colour display

This would be enough to encourage complacency in some companies, but not Apple, which continued to innovate in a way that would at least partially justify the high prices. The Machintosh II, for instance, wasn’t simply a spec-boost of the original Macintosh. It looked completely different, being housed in a horizontal case that the end user (or an engineer) could open themselves to upgrade the memory, drives and so on. This was a major break from Apple’s established way of doing things, where all previous computers, with the exception of the build-it-yourself Apple I, had been shipped in closed boxes, largely because Jobs saw this as a way of making them more friendly and less threatening.

It was also the first Macintosh to ship with a colour display, and although it’s difficult to imagine what a difference that would make today, we only need to think back to early, mono iPods and compare them to the iPod touch to understand the impact it must have had.

Aside from heading up the development of conventional computers, Gassée also oversaw a lot of Apple’s behind-the-scenes development, where designers were dreaming up new products that would one day drive the company to new heights. Two of the fruits of those labours, the Newton MessagePad and the eMate, were particularly prescient, as they pointed towards Apple’s later dominance of lightweight computing through the iPad and iPhone, but they didn’t see the light of day before Gassée’s own departure from Apple.

His tenure ran from 1981 until the end of the decade, which was the point the focus on highly-priced premium products started to falter. IBM clones were getting cheaper, and with the uptake of Windows and inexpensive desktop publishing applications, even some of Apple’s most loyal customers were tempted to jump ship.

What Gassée did after Apple

The fourth quarter of 1989 marked the first time Apple had seen a drop in sales. The stock market got edgy, Apple’s shares lost a fifth of its value, and despite having once been tipped to one day head up the company, Gassée left the following year. Like Jobs, he went on to found another radical computer company – in this case, Be Incorporated, which developed the BeOS operating system.

As we’ll see in a later episode, his work with BeOS would come close to bringing Gassée back to the company. For now, though, Apple was focused on trying to win back some of the less wealthy customers by introducing a range of lower-priced computers, including the Macintosh Classic (8MHz processor, integrated mono display, $999), Macintosh LC (16MHz processor, pizza box case, colour capable; the initials stood for LC, but it cost $999 without a display), and Macintosh IIsi (20MHz processor, large desktop case, $2999 without a display).

Today, amongst other things, Gassée writes a blog, here . 

Unsurprisingly, after so many years of waiting, Apple customers lapped up these new, affordable machines, and the company enjoyed a revival. Indeed, by returning to basics, almost literally, Apple was back on the up, and about to wow the world with two of its most radical products ever, as we’ll discover below.

Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise

So Steve Jobs has gone, and so has Jean-Louis Gassée, his successor as head of product development. All in all, the future isn’t looking so bright for Apple at this point in its story. Despite initially being quite successful in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before.

That wasn’t its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 – a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.

Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.

It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today – and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.

Apple’s Quadra and Performa

Apple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).

The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple’s computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).

It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn’t quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing – so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts .

It’s unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we’re used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It’s hypnotic – and it’s hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.

Macintosh Performa 6300

You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia , and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded – and to which it has since returned – had by now been lost.

Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn’t always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.

The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and Motorola

Together, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP – the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).

Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.

Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.

AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.

If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP’s legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.

The PowerPC years

If you bought a new Apple computer any time between 1994 and 2006, you’ll have taken home a PowerPC-based device, the genesis of which we explored above. The fruit of a productive collaboration between Apple, IBM (yes IBM) and Motorola – the AIM Alliance – it was, for a while, one of the most advanced platforms on the planet. Indeed, it proved versatile enough to sit at the heart of everything from the lowly iBook, right up to the mightiest enterprise-focused Xserve.

PowerPC 601 Processor Prototype

The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, and its core technology was based on IBM’s POWER instruction set, so even though it was an innovation of the early-1990s it wasn’t an entirely alien platform for developers coding for the Mac.

This helped make PowerPC a viable alternative to the x86-based processors being shipped by Intel and AMD, which were then dominating the computing market. Even Microsoft shipped a version of Windows NT for PowerPC before scaling back to focus solely on x86 and, later, Freescale.

The first PowerPC-based Macintosh (pre-Mac) was 1994’s Power Macintosh 6100 which, as its name suggests, was based on the 601 processor, running at 60MHz and developed using code that was already familiar to engineers from both Motorola and Apple. As the Quadra’s successor, it was the first machine able to run Mac OS 9, which would likely have been a big enough sales point on its own.

However, perhaps hedging its bets (platform transitions are nerve-wracking projects, after all) it also released a DOS-compatible version, which instead used an Intel 486 processor and allowed Windows and Mac OS to be run simultaneously, effectively doing what VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop do today, and VirtualPC did in the PowerPC line’s latter years.

Power Macintosh 6100

The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename ‘Carl Sagan’. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company ‘Billions and Billions’, which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter ‘B’ when saying the word ‘billions’ so people wouldn’t confuse it with millions.

Although it was never used to market the 7100, Sagan claimed that customers might have considered the codename, which was revealed in a magazine, to imply that he endorsed the product. He wrote to the magazine, asking them to make it clear that he did not, at which point Apple’s development team re-named the computer BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued for libel and lost, with the court ruling that “one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head'” .

Eventually the two parties settled out of court, at which point the 7100 was again renamed, this time to LAW, or Lawyers Are Wimps.

The PowerPC line enjoyed a good innings, but by the middle of this century’s first decade (we’re jumping ahead a bit here to tie-up the PowerPC story), fractures were starting to appear in the alliance and the platform wasn’t evolving quickly enough to keep consumers happy. Apple’s high-end notebook, the PowerBook, was starting to look a little underpowered, and in an effort to push the processor in the Power Mac G5 beyond its native rating, it produced three special editions that employed a sophisticated water cooling system that allowed it to overclock the processor without it overheating.

PowerPC 970FX processor, as used in one of the last Power Mac G5s

Those in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs’ 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.

Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they’d frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, ‘It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. “As we look ahead… we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come,” Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. “[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map.”‘

You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they’d have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.

This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard , the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn’t install it by default – you had to add it manually.)

PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it’s a popular choice for embedded processing.

Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC’s dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple’s survival.

Apple and Microsoft

If IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft’s on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you’d never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that’s probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic.

IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16% over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft’s revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can – including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.

Apple, on the other hand, needs Office. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.

So, a peace has broken out – and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs’ return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn’t really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.

Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. “To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different,” he said in 1984, “it takes something that’s really new, and really captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I’ve seen – is the only one that meets that standard.”

That’s pretty flattering, but there’s a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn’t see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple’s eyes, went on to imitate its products a little too faithfully.

As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox’s implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Windows and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling “our friends up north”.

That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.

Microsoft Windows 1.0

Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.

However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system – such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on – should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.

The court didn’t buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.

Microsoft Windows 2.0

However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they’d been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al’s tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.

Ultimately, Xerox’s act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.

Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.

Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn’t, it’s possible there might be no Mac today. Why? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn’t do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.

Business users wouldn’t switch to a platform that didn’t support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments – particularly those in mixed-platform offices – often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.

So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates , who was then Microsoft’s CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.

In return, Apple unseated Netscape as the Mac’s default browser and installed Internet Explorer in its place, which was actively developed right up until 2003, when in the face rumours that Apple was working on its own browser in house – Safari – Microsoft scaled back its work on IE for Mac to the point where, today, it no longer runs on OS X.

Apple in the 1990s

Apple was a very different company in the 1990s to the one we know today. It had a lot of products and a lot of stock, but not enough customers. There’s only so long a company can survive like that.

Looking back on it now, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was losing its way. Alongside its computer range, it was producing digital cameras (where it was ahead of most of the big-name players that now dominate photography), video consoles, TV appliances and CD players. It had also invested heavily in the Newton platform to produce the MessagePad and eMate lines.

In many respects, to use a well-worn cliche, it was running before it could walk. Almost all of these products have equivalents in Apple’s current line-up where they form the basis of the iPhone camera, Apple TV, iPad and so on, but in the 1990s there was no way to link them all together. They were, to all intents and purposes, disparate and largely disconnected products; there was no overarching storyline to what Apple was producing the way there is now, where the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and iOS devices can all share data courtesy of iCloud.

To make matters worse, the decision to license a lot of its technologies was only making it harder for Apple to succeed in each marketplace, as it was enabling its rivals to produce cheaper cloned versions of its top-line products. Even the Newton platform wasn’t immune, with Motorola, Siemens and Sharp, among others, using the operating system and hardware spec to build their own products.

Cloning remains a contentious issue in Apple history. Aside from being bad news from Apple’s in-house hardware development, many consumers would say it was actually good for the end user, as it encouraged competition and, as a result, lowered prices. That brought more people to the platform than Apple would have managed to attract on its own, which in turn ensured continued support from application developers, including key names like Adobe and Microsoft, without whom the computer line-up may well have collapsed.

But something had to give – and a decision had to be made, which turned out to be one of the most momentous decisions in the company’s history.

Jobs returns to Apple

Apple was still on the look out for a new operating system, as its in-house efforts weren’t going as well as it had hoped. By 1996 it had shortlisted two possible suppliers: BeOS and NeXTSTEP, each of which had a historical connection to Apple itself.

BeOS was developed by Be Inc, a company founded by former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassée. He had been appointed as Apple’s director of European operations in 1981 and, four years later, was responsible for informing Apple’s board of Jobs’ intention to oust CEO John Sculley – the act that led to Jobs’ departure from the company.

NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, came from NeXT – the company that Jobs founded upon leaving Apple. Although NeXT’s hardware didn’t go on to sell in the quantities that Apple was shipping, it was highly thought of and is perhaps best known as the platform on which Tim Berners Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at Cern.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher for either man – or either company – but in the end Apple chose NeXTSTEP.

If it had been a simple licensing deal that wouldn’t have been so remarkable, but in truth it was far more than that. Apple purchased NeXT itself – not just its operating system – for $429m in cash, plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, effectively buying back Steve Jobs in the process.

The man who had co-founded the company was returning to it after 12 years away.

Making changes

Buying NeXT wasn’t enough to fix Apple’s ongoing woes on its own. Its share price was declining, and over the next six months it fell still further, to a 12-year low.

Jobs convinced the board of directors that the company’s CEO, Gil Amelio, had to go and, when it agreed, it installed Jobs in his place as interim CEO. At that point, Apple began a remarkable period of restructuring that leads directly to the successful organisation it is today.

Jobs recognised that if Apple was going to survive it needed to concentrate on a narrower selection of products. He slimmed down the range of computers to just four – two for consumers and two for businesses – and closed down a lot of supplementary divisions, including the one working on the Newton.

At the same time, he saw that the licensing deals it had signed weren’t doing it any favours, and he brought them to an end. The immediate effect wasn’t good, as it saw the market share of new computers running Apple’s operating system dropping from 10% to just 3% – but at least 100% of them were being built by Apple itself.

The strategy paid off in the long run, though, and Apple’s computers and operating system are holding their own in a world where rivals are seeing year on year stagnation or – worse – decline.

Not everyone was convinced, though. When asked what he would do to fix the broken Apple Computer Inc, Michael Dell, who founded the Windows-based rival that carries his name, told a Gartner Symposium, ‘What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.’

Dell was riding high at the time, but over the years the two companies’ relative positions have changed, and in 2006 Jobs mocked his rival in an email he sent to Apple staff.

“Team,” the email read. “It turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.”

And were things “different tomorrow”?

Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the long run they were very different indeed. Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalisation, while Dell went back to private ownership, as Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought out the existing shareholders.

Exploring the Origins of the Apple

Apples originally evolved in the wild to entice ancient megafauna to disperse their seeds. More recently, humans began spreading the trees along the Silk Road with other familiar crops. Dispersing the apple trees led to their domestication.

Recent archaeological finds of ancient preserved apple seeds across Europe and West Asia combined with historical, paleontological, and recently published genetic data are presenting a fascinating new narrative for one of our most familiar fruits. In this study, Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History traces the history of the apple from its wild origins, noting that it was originally spread by ancient megafauna and later as a process of trade along the Silk Road. These processes allowed for the development of the varieties that we know today.

Horses eating wild apples in the Tien Shan Mountains. These domesticated horses demonstrate the process of seed dispersal that wild apple trees evolved to support millions of years ago, when large monogastric mammals such as these were prominent across Eurasia.

© Artur Stroscherer

The apple is, arguably, the most familiar fruit in the world. It is grown in temperate environments around the globe and its history is deeply intertwined with humanity. Depictions of large red fruits in Classical art demonstrate that domesticated apples were present in southern Europe over two millennia ago, and ancient seeds from archaeological sites attest to the fact that people have been collecting wild apples across Europe and West Asia for more than ten thousand years. While it is clear that people have closely maintained wild apple populations for millennia, the process of domestication, or evolutionary change under human cultivation, in these trees is not clear.

The wild apples in the Tien Shan Mountains represent the main ancestral population for our modern apple. These trees produce large fruits, which are often red when ripe and have a varying array of flavors. These were the ancestors of the trees that people first started to cultivate and spread along the Silk Road.

© Prof. Dr. Martin R. Stuchtey

Several recent genetic studies have demonstrated that the modern apple is a hybrid of at least four wild apple populations, and researchers have hypothesized that the Silk Road trade routes were responsible for bringing these fruits together and causing their hybridization. Archaeological remains of apples in the form of preserved seeds have been recovered from sites across Eurasia, and these discoveries support the idea that fruit and nut trees were among the commodities that moved on these early trade routes. Spengler recently summarized the archaeobotanical and historical evidence for cultivated crops on the Silk Road in a book titled Fruit from the Sands , published with the University of California Press. The apple holds a deep connection with the Silk Road – much of the genetic material for the modern apple originated at the heart of the ancient trade routes in the Tien Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan. Furthermore, the process of exchange caused the hybridization events that gave rise to the large red sweet fruits in our produce markets.

Understanding how and when apple trees evolved to produce larger fruits is an important question for researchers, because fruit trees do not appear to have followed the same path towards domestication as other, better-understood crops, such as cereals or legumes. Many different wild and anthropogenic forces apply selective pressure on the crops in our fields, it is not always easy to reconstruct what pressures caused which evolutionary changes. Therefore, looking at evolutionary processing in modern and fossil plants can help scholars interpret the process of domestication. Fleshy sweet fruits evolve to attract animals to eat then and spread their seeds; large fruits specifically evolve to attract large animals to disperse them.

Large fruits evolved to attract ancient megafauna

The forests of foothill zones of the western Tien Shan Mountains in Kazakhstan are home to the progenitor of our modern apple tree. Most of these forests are threatened today, due to urban sprawl from the city of Almaty, the cultivation of modern apple trees in the region, and the loss of summer glacial melt.

© Robert Spengler

While most scholars studying domestication focus on the period when humans first start cultivating a plant, in this study Spengler explores the processes in the wild that set the stage for domestication. Spengler suggests that understanding the process of evolution of large fruits in the wild will help us understand the process of their domestication. “Seeing that fruits are evolutionary adaptations for seed dispersal, the key to understanding fruit evolution rests in understanding what animals were eating the fruits in the past,” he explains.

Many fruiting plants in the apple family (Rosaceae) have small fruits, such as cherries, raspberries, and roses. These small fruits are easily swallowed by birds, which then disperse their seeds. However, certain trees in the family, such as apples, pears, quince, and peaches, evolved in the wild to be too large for a bird to disperse their seeds. Fossil and genetic evidence demonstrate that these large fruits evolved several million years before humans started cultivating them. So who did these large fruits evolve to attract?

The evidence suggests that large fruits are an evolutionary adaptation to attract large animals that can eat the fruits and spread the seeds. Certain large mammals, such as bears and domesticated horses, eat apples and spread the seeds today. However, prior to the end of the last Ice Age, there were many more large mammals on the European landscape, such as wild horses and large deer. Evidence suggests that seed dispersal in the large-fruiting wild relatives of the apple has been weak during the past ten thousand years, since many of these animals went extinct. The fact that wild apple populations appear to map over glacial refugial zones of the Ice Age further suggests that these plants have not been moving over long distances or colonizing new areas in the absence of their original seed-spreaders.

Trade along the Silk Road likely enabled the development of the apple we know today

Venders in every Central Asian bazaar sell a diverse array of apples. This woman in the Bukhara bazaar is selling a variety of small sweet yellow apples, which she locally cultivated in Uzbekistan. Some of the fruits sold in these markets today travel great distances, similar to how they would have during the peak of the Silk Road.

Wild apple tree populations were isolated after the end of the last Ice Age, until humans started moving the fruits across Eurasia, in particular along the Silk Road. Once humans brought these tree lineages back into contact with each other again, bees and other pollinators did the rest of the work. The resulting hybrid offspring had larger fruits, a common result of hybridization. Humans noticed the larger fruiting trees and fixed this trait in place through grafting and by planting cuttings of the most favored trees. Thus, the apples we know today were primarily not developed through a long process of the selection and propagation of seeds from the most favored trees, but rather through hybridization and grafting. This process may have been relatively rapid and parts of it were likely unintentional. The fact that apple trees are hybrids and not “properly” domesticated is why we often end up with a crabapple tree when we plant an apple seed.

A wild apple tree in the Tien Shan Mountains, Kazakhstan. Much of the genetic material for our modern domesticated apple can be traced back to this wild population.

This study challenges the definition of “domestication”’ and demonstrates that there is no one-shoe-fits-all model to explain plant evolution under human cultivation. For some plants, domestication took millennia of cultivation and human-induced selective pressure - for other plants, hybridization caused rapid morphological change. “The domestication process is not the same from all plants, and we still do not know much about the process in long-generation trees,” notes Spengler. “It is important that we look past annual grasses, such as wheat and rice, when we study plant domestication. There are hundreds of other domesticated plants on the planet, many of which took different pathways toward domestication.” Ultimately, the apple in your kitchen appears to owe its existence to extinct megafaunal browsers and Silk Road merchants.

• Timeline: The history of Apple
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Timeline: The history of Apple since 1976

(as of July 2020)

This timeline details Apple’s history – from the company’s founding on April 1, 1976, to Steve Jobs’ departure in 1985, his return in 1997, his triumphant product presentations, his death in October 2011, and his continuation at Apple under his successor, Tim Cook.

April 1, 1976

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with the help of venture capitalist Armas Clifford “Mike” Markkula found Apple Computer to market the Apple I. Wayne drops out after a few weeks because he doesn’t want to take the risk as a family man.

In May 1976 “Woz” presents the Apple I at the meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. The computer costs later $666.66. Paul Terell, head of the chain Byte Shop places 50 orders alone. In total, about 200 devices are sold.

In April 1977, Apple launches the Apple II. The Apple II series was an open system, which means that all essential construction details were published. This construction principle was later copied by IBM and marketed as the IBM PC. The Apple II became the first microcomputer to be widely distributed. It cost $1,295 at launch.

Jef Raskin (34) starts at Apple Computer. Raskin was Apple Computer’s thirty-first employee, its manager of publications, and manager of the Macintosh project from 1979 to 1982.

A research project for a new low-cost computer is started under the direction of Jef Raskin. This would later become the Macintosh project. Raskin leaves Apple in 1982, even before the Mac was launched, because he would not accept Steve Jobs’ meddling. In June 1979, the Apple II+ is launched for $1,195. In July 1979, the project for the Apple Lisa is started. The computer was supposed to be ready in March 1981. In fact, it took until January 1983.

Steve Jobs and his team at Apple visit the legendary research institute Xerox PARC, where they see several novel technologies. These include the Xerox Alto, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, the computer mouse, and object-oriented programming.

Specifications for the Apple Lisa are developed. It includes several features that Apple employees have seen at Xerox PARC. On December 12, 1980, Apple goes public, floating 4.6 million shares of stock at $22 per share. The Apple IPO makes some rich, others mad.

Steve Jobs takes over the Macintosh project. IBM introduces its PC. Apple “welcomes” IBM to the PC market in an ad.

Steve Wozniak crashes a private plane and partially retires from Apple.

Jef Raskin quits after being pushed out of the Macintosh project by Steve Jobs.

The Apple Lisa hits the market on January 22, 1983 for $9,995. As sales falter, the price drops to $6,995 by the end of the year. At Apple, the previously competing Lisa and Mac divisions are merged. In April, Steve Jobs convinced Pepsico president John Sculley to join Apple. “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to take a chance and change the world?” was Jobs’ legendary question, which ultimately won Sculley over as Apple CEO.

In order to qualify for the Cannes Advertising Film Festival, Apple had the famous Big Brother commercial for the Mac in December 1983 on TV station KMVT in Twin Apple Lisa (1983) Falls (Idaho). On January 22, 1984, six weeks later, the commercial then aired during a commercial break in SuperBowl XVIII. The ad not only cleared Cannes, but was repeatedly aired by TV stations in the news. The Chiat/Day agency calculated that the “1984” spot generated over five million dollars worth of free publicity.

January 24, 1984: The Mac is launched for $2,495. The Apple Lisa 2 retails for $3,495. Apple launches the “Test a Mac” promotional program. Prospective customers can take a Mac home from a retailer for 24 hours to try it out, free of charge. Although the promotion was unique and innovative up to that point, the program does not show the desired success. For one thing, too few Macs are initially available. And many customers do not bring the computers back to the stores in perfect condition, incurring significant repair costs. April 24, 1984: The Apple IIc is introduced. With the different Apple II series, Apple does the main part of its business.

Sales of the Mac falter because too few applications are available. After a power struggle with then Apple CEO John Sculley, Steve Jobs is relieved of his operational duties. Jobs leaves Apple and founds the computer company NeXT Inc. and uses the proceeds from stock sales to buy Lucas Film’s animation division, creating Pixar.

“AS YOU KNOW, THE COMPANY’S RECENT REORGANIZATION LEFT ME WITH NO WORK TO DO AND NO ACCESS EVEN TO REGULAR MANAGEMENT REPORTS. I AM BUT 30 AND WANT STILL TO CONTRIBUTE AND ACHIEVE.“

— Steven P. Jobs in a  letter  to Mike Markkula

The Apple Lisa is discontinued. Some models are converted and sold as the Mac XL. Microsoft licenses some of the Mac technologies to develop its Office package for the Mac. At the end of 1985 Microsoft publishes its first Windows version 1.01.

Apple builds the Mac II, the first Mac that does not rely on an all-in-one design. The Mac II can also support color displays. At the same time, Apple launches the Mac SE with the classic all-in-one design. Both machines allow expansion slots to be added to Macs for the first time. The installed base of Mac users grows to 1 million users. Ross Perot invests $20 million in NeXT, Inc. In August 1987, Microsoft releases its first version of Windows, but it is virtually unusable.

The greatly improved Windows 2.03 is released. Apple sues Microsoft over various similarities between Windows and Mac OS. Microsoft counters the counterclaim and refers to the license agreement from the year 1985. A protracted legal battle ensues, with Apple unable to stop the further development of Windows. Apple is unable to stop the further development of Windows. Microsoft prevails in court in 1992 and also wins the appeal two years later. In 1995, the US Supreme Court confirms the rejection of the appeal.

Xerox sues Apple over the user interface of the Mac and the Apple Lisa. The suit is dismissed a year later. Apple Computer is also sued by Apple Corps Ltd, the Beatles’ record label, for trademark infringement. In 2006, the Beatles initially lose. In 2010, the adversaries come to an agreement. The agreement stipulates that in the future, California-based Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer Inc.) will own all rights to the “Apple” trademark and the apple logo and will license some usage rights from the Beatles’ record company Apple Corps Ltd. in return. Apple disposes of unsold models of the Lisa in a landfill in Logan, Utah. Apple introduces the Macintosh Portable. The device weighs about seven kilograms and was initially shipped without a backlight on the screen. As a result, the Portable barely lived up to its name and did not sell well.

Steve Jobs launches the NeXTstation for 4,995, a year after introducing the NeXTstep OS operating system

Apple draws conclusions from the portable debacle and launches the much lighter and more compact PowerBook 100, the first true Mac notebook.

Apple sets new standards with the subnote family PowerBook Duo. A docking station ensures that several interfaces do not have to be present in the PowerBook Duo itself in order to save weight and space. Apple and Novell launch the “Star Trek” project, which aims to get the Macintosh operating system running on Intel hardware. A first proof of concept is created. However, the project is abandoned in 1993. Microsoft launches Windows 3.1 and increasingly competes with Apple.

Apple delivers the first Power Macintosh models. These computers no longer contain a 680×0 processor from Motorola, but the more modern PowerPC chips produced by Motorola and IBM. Apple launches the Apple Newton PDA at the Macworld Expo in Boston in August 1983. The futuristic device proves to be little success in business because important features such as handwriting recognition work only moderately. The Newton flop also undermined Apple CEO John Sculley’s position of power.

Michael Spindler, who is called “The Diesel” at Apple, replaces Sculley as Apple’s chief executive. Sculley remains chairman for now.

The first “DOS-compatible” Mac, the Quadra 610, is introduced. It contains a second motherboard and other components to run DOS and early Windows versions in parallel to the Mac OS. This is followed by a handful of Macs that are also “DOS compatible”. Apple licenses its operating system Mac OS to selected Mac clone manufacturers like Power Computing or Umax, with Apple retaining control over key components of the hardware design used by the licensees. Code-named “Copland”, this is Apple’s first attempt to replace its aging operating system.

In the operating system version, Mac OS 7.5 Apple introduces the tools Mac Easy Open and PC Exchange. They allow the exchange of floppy disks and files with PCs running DOS or Windows.

Power Computing ships the first Mac clones: Power, PowerWave and PowerCurve. August 24th, 1995: Microsoft launches Windows 95 with a huge publicity show.

The PowerBook 1400 becomes the first Mac notebook to ship with an internal optical drive. Apple freezes development of Copland and begins searching for companies that can provide a technological foundation for the next generation of an operating system. The company Be Inc., which had been founded by former Apple manager Jean-Louis Gassée, is shortlisted. The company had developed the BeOS. Apple CEO Michael Spindler is replaced by Gil Amelio.

Apple introduces the Power Mac G3. It is the first Mac with the PowerPC G3 processor. To mark the twentieth anniversary of Apple’s founding, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac is released. In an all-in-one design, Apple installs an LCD flat-panel display for desktop Macs for the first time. The anniversary Mac costs a whopping $7,500. For that, customers get a setup through a concierge service. Later, the price of the “Spartacus” drops significantly. Apple surprisingly decides against BeOS and takes over NeXT in order to use the NeXT operating system OpenStep as a basis for its own new operating system. This deal also brings Steve Jobs back to Apple, initially as a consultant.

Apple announces Rhapsody, the code name for the new Mac OS based on NeXT OpenStep, for developers. Apple releases Mac OS 8, the name it originally intended to use for the Copland system. Since the clone license agreements are tied to Mac OS 7.x, this move marks the beginning of the end of the Mac clone era. Gil Amelio resigns as Apple CEO and makes room for Steve Jobs at the top of the company.

Steve Jobs transforms Apple’s offerings, saying goodbye to products like the Apple Newton and introducing the iMac as the cornerstone of Apple’s product line. It is the first Mac with a USB and SCSI port. Umax discontinues the last Mac clone, the SuperMac.

The Power Mac G3 Blue & White is introduced. The clever tower design with an easy-open latch, the Mac as easy as upgrade or repair. The first iBook picks up the colorful design of the iMac and is designed to strengthen Apple’s position in the market. The first iMac (1997) in the education market again.

The Macintosh hardware comes with a multimedia software package: iMovie was first introduced in October 1999, which made it convenient to edit home videos. Later came iDVD for semi-professional DVD productions. With iPhoto, Garage Band and iWeb, the iLife package was then put together: The Mac thus evolved into the “hub” of the digital life.

Read more: Timeline (part II) – The history of Apple (2000 – 2009)

Timeline – The history of Apple (2000 – 2009)

Timeline – the history of apple (2010 – 2020).

Steve jobs is dead in 2011 not in 2001 like you said in intro

I still remember when Steve Jobs launched the NeXTstation

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History of Apple: the iPhone

Aug 08, 2014

1.59k likes | 4.45k Views

History of Apple: the iPhone. Prepared By: Aubrey Hammill , Winifred Larry, Michael Olson, Mabel Smeckert, & Kristen Wood . Whispers of Apple venturing into the mobile phone market emerged in 2004.

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History of Apple: the iPhone Prepared By: Aubrey Hammill, Winifred Larry, Michael Olson, Mabel Smeckert, & Kristen Wood

Whispers of Apple venturing into the mobile phone market emerged in 2004. • On January 9th, 2007 in San Francisco, CA Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the release of the newest Apple product, the iPhone. Introduction of the iPhone

+ • Introduced to the world in 2007 • Multi-touch screen • Ability to sync with iTunes • Excellent web browsing capabilities • Originally exclusive to AT&T • $599 for the 8GB iPhone 1(iPhone 2G) Introduction

Introduced at $599, the public was nonresponsive to its high price • Market share rose when the price lowered to $399 (Vogelsetin) • For the first time, “consumers get an easy-to-use handheld computer. “ (Vogelsetin) • 6 million units sold, with 4 carriers in 4 countries (Richie) iPhone1: Public Response

Improved functions: • iPhone OS 2.0 was introduced • 36% faster web browser • Available in white or black • Price Reductions • $199/$299, depending on capacity • A year after its release, the price lowered to $99 (Richie). • AT&T continues as exclusive carrier • 1 million units sold in 1st week • 20 million units sold by 2009 iPhone 3G:New Functions & Public Response

Improved Functions: • Oil-resistant screen coating reduced finger prints and other oil smudges • Improved processing speed 2-4x faster • iPhone OS 3.0 • Upgraded touch sensors • Improved camera • 3GS also offered voice control, controlling calls and music playback • Price continued at $199/$299 • The iPhone 3GS hit 80 countries and hit 1 million sale units within the first week (Richie). iPhone 3GS:New Functions & Public Response

Introduced in 2010 • Upgrades from the previous 3GS include: • 24% thinner • useful battery life increased • camera upgraded to 5 mega pixels Faster processor (1 GHz up from 600 MHz) • 5.0 megapixel camera (up from 3.0) • New VGA front camera • "FaceTime' video chat (Colon, Hill) • Price again remained at $199/$299 • iPhone 4’s antenna occasionally malfunctioned in poor reception areas (Richie). iPhone 4:Functions

In 2011 it was announced that the iPhone would be available through AT&T and Verizon • 1.7 million units were sold the first week of the iPhone 4 (Richie). iPhone 4The Public

iPhone 4S launched in 2011 • The antenna was improved, so signal was improved on the iPhone 4S • The processor was made faster, as seemed pretty typical for the S models • Price stayed the same at $199/$299, with a larger model at $399 • The iPhone 4S had several upgrades, including: • 8.0 megapixel camera, up from 5.0 mega pixel. • Voice-recognition and control through 'Siri'. • It is a world phone, meaning it will support both CDMA and GSM networks. • Records video at 1080p, up from 720p. (Colon, Hill). iPhone 4SThe Functions

The launch dates between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S was the largest gap in iPhone history, partially due to the loss of founder, Steve Jobs • The iPhone 4S sold 4 million units the first week (Richie). • The iPhone 4S is now available at AT&T, Verizon and Sprint (Colon, Hill). iPhone 4S:Public Response

Introduced in 2012 • iPhone 5 was improved: • .07 inches thinner • One ounce lighter (3.95 ounces) • Brushed aluminum back replaced fragile glass • Front facing camera improved to 0.9 megapixel (Colon, Hill) • Low-reflection screen increased to 4” • iPhone 5 included first custom processor • Smaller dock • Pricing at $199, $299 and $399 with service contract (Richie). iPhone 5: New Functions

iPhone 5 sold 5 million units itsfirst week • Available in 100 countries on 240 carriers (Richie). iPhone 5:Public Response

Released in the Fall of 2013 alongside iPhone 5S • Apple is targeting a younger generation with the iPhone 5c • Introduced in new fun colors • Set at a lower price of $99 with a 2 year contract (Tsukayama) iPhone 5C:New Functions

Starting at $199 • Features that measure motion and environmental information • Can be used on a fitness app (Tsukayama). • Also introduced a new fingerprint sensor • More secure than the 4 digit PIN (Tsukayama) • Introduced in new colors • gold and gray (Richie) iPhone 5S:New Functions

Apple had been losing market share before introduction of iPhone 5c and 5s (Tsukayama). • Phone 5C is made of plastic rather than glass and aluminum • Profit margin increased by using lower cost inputs (Tsukayama). • 3. 9 million iPhone 5s sold its opening weekend (Rogowsky). • 200 million iOS devices have upgraded to iOS7 • Twice as many picked up iOS 6 last year (Rogowsky). iPhone 5C & 5S: Public Response

Apple should continue developing new and improved iPhones and creating new technology. • New, less expensive iPhones with the same level of technology as the more expensive modelsincrease sales to younger generations. • With the introduction of less costly iPhones, Apple Inc. will be able to continue appealing to new markets. Conclusions & Recommendations

Apple Inc. (2010, February 19). iphone - technical specifications. Retrieved from http://support.apple.com/kb/sp2 • Bradshaw, T. (2013, August 26). Apple Looks to Build Market Share with the Cheaper iPhone 5C. In CNBC. Retrieved September 28, 2013, from http://www.cnbc.com/id/100988164 •   Cheng, J. (2008, October 21). Apple officially surpasses 10 million iphones sold in 2008. ARS Technica, Retrieved from http://arstechnica.com/apple/2008/10/apple-officially-surpasses-10-million-iphones-sold-in-2008/ • Colon, A. (2011, October 4). Battle of the iPhones: iPhone 4S vs. 4 vs. 3GS. Retrieved September 26, 2013 from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394115,00.asp • Hill, S. (2012, October 19). iPhone5 vs. iPhone 4S: Our In-depth Comparison. RetrievedSeptember26, 2013, from http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-iphone-5-vs-iphone-4s-spec-showdown/ • Markoff, J. (2007, January 10). Apple introduces innovative cellphone. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/technology/10apple.html?_r=1oref=slogin& • Popper, B. (2013, October 23). Is the iPhone 5C a sucess?. In The Verge. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/4844698/is-the-apple-iphone-5c-a-success •  Ritchie, R. (2013, August 28). History of the iPhone 3G: Twice as Fast, Half the Price. In iMore. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.imore.com/history-iphone-3g •  Ritchie, R. (2013, August 30). History of the iPhone 3GS: Faster and More Powerful. In iMore. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.imore.com/history-iphone-3gs • Ritchie, R. (2013, September 1). History of the iPhone 4: Changing Everything-Again. In iMore. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.imore.com/history-iphone-4 • Ritchie, R. (2013, September 2). History of the iPhone 4S: The Most Amazing iPhone Yet. In iMore. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.imore.com/history-iphone-4s • Ritchie, R. (2013, September 3). History of the iPhone 5: The Biggest Thing to Happen to iPhone. In iMore. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.imore.com/history-iphone-5 References

Rogowsky, M. (2013, September 25). Apple Can’t Win. In Forbes. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/09/25/apple-cant-win/ • Tsukayama, H. (2013, September 10). Apple Unveils Cheaper iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S with Fingerprint Sensor. In The Washington Post. Retrieved September 25, 2013, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-likely-to-unveil-2-new-smartphones/2013/09/10/fe107898-1a1d-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html References(Continued)

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History of Apple

Aug 31, 2020

Alejandro Ramírez

Description

A little history of Apple products.

these words diffused logo off the Apple company in 19 76 created by Ronald Wayne. He bone a May 17 in 1973 Now is every turn American electron ICS industry businessmen And okay, today the Apple logo is a sign ball off innovation on trust we have you get despite it to create something that's original and unique as the upper local design. A bull cames in three colors 36 Juice A Golden Macintosh was foods personal computed for Apple Company. It's based. Consider us on us on nine each. Um, here I monitor and came with a keyboard and mouse on. There's We have the new I Mac 2020 introducing 10 generation interpreter scissors. More wrong, more as a DS store s foster a nd GPS and through town, Super for their display. My book is a lying off laptop computer designing month for month off director on sold by Apple Computer Inc from 1999 to 20 sort of fight. Ah, the iBook had three different designs during its life. Fine. The first know us day Clamshell. The My Book Pro is a lying off Macintosh portable computers introduced in January 20 Sirach seats by Apple in its the Heidger on model Off the Mark in touch in my book family sitting up off the Consumer Focus. My book I'm is sold with 13 and 16 inch screens. The iPhone color Killian know as the iPhone to G different iPhone interest veneration. His defense is Marfan. Design it on, Marketed by upward in it WASA officially in isn't on January night off 20 Serial seven on was later released in the U. S. On June 29 and then we have the new iPhone 11 remarks with three brilliance cameras A. Treating chips faster face 89 months, uh, shorter resistant glass, improved water resistant and more. IPhone wants approach. It starts at 999. We can forget the famous iPod different generation iPod. It's a tablet computer. Design it on, marketed by apple in as the foods device in the iPod. Light around off tablet computers with seven inch screens explains uncertain body in a couple days off. Asks accessing Celeron their books to the iPad. Pro is absolutely best, but it doesn't come cheap. Like the orders. It doesn't have borrowing or to shady, but it used from Kamata for FISA D. Just let the most modern iPhones under but pro half our new futures. Like the new iPhones, this is the first generation off apple watch Apple watches and laying off one smartwatches produced by upper in it incorporates fin. It's striking on health oriented couple villages with intervention. With your eyes are other apple products and services. It was the food is more wash in couple, and now we have the 50 additional with the apple watch Apple Watch heart going from the strangest Francine's It's lounge and in your futures on we finding those futures where you were, where it's easy to your finished up, diluted to three music directly to your airports or to your headphones. Or he was in the upper watches to pay the Reina model off their airports. It's debit solution, not used. Cables have a good song, Peace of mind to do activities and considered good durability in the A battery for use is considered at the most or the best option to do physical activities. We have cables, the airport's provide and your design more comfortable, more useful on more really well that they prudence is ours. Off the first on second generation on the new purpose. Half new futures like transporters mold, water resistant, no at all, like sweets over up to four dot five hours off listening Apple TV. It's the way to be able to watch videos, movies, play music, use after the streaming videos or music, or just to convert a basic defeat to a smart one with Ah, for K or H D Signal. Fifth generation off IOS IOS is a mobile operating season created under Beloved by Apple. Being is the operating system that powers many off the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPod touch. It's all super work. The iPod until the introduction off iPod OS here, we can see this simplicity off locals. US. 14 introduced new ways to customize the home screen. Discovered and use ups with ups. Please. I stayed connected in message. I was 14 introducing the biggest day ever to conscript based with beautiful, greatest language. It's on the up library, and you waited up into the upstart. This is going off. The upward retail is sort United States. The descent off operas so reflects its brand minimalist, simple, fantastic aren't concerned where many order resort, in addition to being large on especially stars up, will provide many different services. UN for customer and not customer for Apple. This is the Apple part is located in Cupertino, California On our political funder is Steve Jobs, one the campus to look less like an office park on more like a natural refuge like this part futuro e zines our hands, and we must have to innovating more on where every day. Upper representing for enough technology in a world full full offering. They were experience connected from point to point. Having access were nowhere. A stroll different device like the one was that Apple Company owns.

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Yash Gupta , Apoorva Bajj

With a market capitalization of over a trillion dollars at the time of this writing, Apple is among, if not the most valuable brand in the world.  In recent years, it has become increasingly rare to not use an Apple product at some point in your day. In fact, as of this month, there are over one billion Apple products being used across the world. The little apple with a bite out of it has become synonymous with technology, music, and growth.

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. Apple is considered one of the Big Four technology companies, along with Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

The company's hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac PC, the iPod portable media player, the Apple Watch smartwatch, the Apple TV digital media player,  and the AirPods wireless earbuds. Apple's software includes the macOS, iOS the iTunes media player, the Safari web browser, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store, Apple Music, iMessage, and iCloud.

History of Apple Apple Motherboards to iPhone and Beyond Apple iMac and iPod Apple Business Model Apple Revenue Model

History of Apple

The history of everyone’s favorite start-up is a tech fairytale with one garage, three friends - Steve Jobs , Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne, and their wild passion to do something big. The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California's Menlo Park from 1975. Woz produced the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer hand-built entirely by Wozniak.

It was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips)—a base kit concept. The approach was to make something simpler for the rest of us. A philosophy even reflected today in Apple’s products. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66 ($2,995 in 2019 dollars, adjusted for inflation).

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from an apple orchard. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited, and not intimidating.” The name also likely benefitted by beginning with an A, which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings.

Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who had left and sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 only twelve days after having co-founded Apple. Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple.

During the first five years of operations, revenues grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533%.

Apple Motherboards to iPhone and Beyond

Steve Jobs was convinced that all future computers would have GUI. The first home computer with a GUI, or graphical user interface — an interface that allows users to interact with visual icons — was the Apple Lisa. Jobs adapted the technology of The Xerox Alto(the first computer to feature GUI) into a computer small enough to fit on a desktop. Despite a fantastic breakthrough, it was a commercial failure due to its high price and limited software titles.

On December 12, 1980, Apple (ticker symbol "AAPL") went public selling 4.6 million shares at $22 per share, generating over $100 million, which was more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956. By the end of the day, the stock rose to $29 per share, and 300 millionaires were created. Apple's market cap was $1.778 billion at the end of its first day of trading.

The Macintosh Computer, In 1984, Apple introduced its most successful product yet — the Macintosh, a personal computer that came with a built-in screen and mouse. The machine featured a GUI, an operating system known as System 1 (the earliest version of Mac OS), and a number of software programs, including the word processor MacWrite and the graphics editor MacPaint. The New York Times said that the Macintosh was the beginning of a "revolution in personal computing."

Macintosh sales were initially good but began to taper off dramatically after the first three months due to its high price, slow speed, and limited range of available software. In early 1985, this sales slump triggered a power struggle between Steve Jobs and CEO John Sculley, who had been hired by Jobs using the famous line, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?" Jobs resigned from Apple in September 1985 and took a number of Apple employees with him to found NeXT Inc. Wozniak had also quit his active employment at Apple earlier in 1985 to pursue other ventures. He continues to represent the company at events or in interviews, receiving a stipend estimated to be $120,000 per year for this role.

Apple iMac and iPod

In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as the interim CEO, and a year later the company introduced a new personal computer, the iMac. The iMac was a strong seller, and Apple quickly went to work developing a suite of digital tools for its users, including the music player iTunes, the video editor iMovie, and the photo editor iPhoto. These were made available as a software bundle known as iLife.

In 2001, Apple released its first version of the iPod , a portable music player that allowed users to store "1000 songs in your pocket". By 2015, Apple had sold 390 million units.

During his keynote speech at the Macworld Expo on January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple Computer, Inc. would thereafter be known as "Apple Inc.", because the company had shifted its emphasis from computers to consumer electronics . The event also saw the announcement of the iPhone and the Apple TV. The company sold 270,000 iPhone units during the first 30 hours of sales, and the device was called "a game changer for the industry". Apple achieved widespread success with its iPhone, by October 2008, Apple was the third-largest mobile handset supplier in the world.

After years of speculation, Apple unveiled the iPad on January 27, 2010. The iPad ran the same touch-based operating system as the iPhone, and all iPhone apps were compatible with the iPad. Later that year on April 3, 2010, the iPad was launched in the US. It sold more than 300,000 units on its first day, and 500,000 by the end of the first week. In May, of the same year, Apple's market cap exceeded that of competitor Microsoft for the first time since 1989.

Jobs passed away in 2011, months after stepping down as CEO, marking the end of an era for Apple, he was replaced by Tim Cook. The company continues to enjoy growth, engaging in many high-profile acquisitions, in recent years buying companies such as Beats Electronics and hardware sensor giant PrimeSense.

Apple Business Model

Customer segments.

In the 20th century, Apple catered primarily to the home computer market, selling products which, although coming with a premium price tag were still affordable for the mass market. In the 21st century, following Jobs' re-branding of Apple Computers Inc. to Apple Inc., Apple has focused increasingly on consumer electronics, with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad becoming flagship products. They continue to cater to the premium end of this market.

Value Proposition

The key to Apple’s success is majorly given to its meticulous, elegant design. Moreover, the loyal customer base formed by Apple in the initial years is still a strong standing point, with customers ready to pay time and again for flawless, high-performance, brilliantly designed devices.

Customer Relationships

Apple maintains its strong relationship with its customers by offering phone and web-chat-based customer service channels, in addition to providing in-person assistance at its various stores worldwide.

Key Activities

Apple's key activities are investing a lot in quality control to ensure products meet the standard their customer base has come to expect. Aside from design, and quality control, branding is a huge part of what Apple does. Apple is extremely conscious of controlling the image it projects and it has painstakingly and consciously cultivated an image of quality, precision, sophistication, and class that enables it to justify the higher price tags its products command relative to its rivals.

Apple Revenue Model

While home computer sales comprised the majority of revenue for most of Apple's history, in the last decade, this has changed as Apple has focussed on smaller consumer electronics. For FY 2022, the sale of iPhones generated between 40-60% of the company's revenues and is consistently their biggest earner.

Macintosh computers were the second biggest earner in FY 2022,  generating around 6-10% of the company's revenue.

The sale of the iPad generated 5-8% of Apple's income in FY 2022.

Sale of other products, including Apple watches and iPods generate around 8-10% of revenue.

Apple's internet services , including iTunes, Apple Care, and Apple Pay accounted for 19.8% of revenue in FY 2022.

The key highlights of the analysis of Apple as a Tech giant are that when the need felt to a shift from the computer industry to consumer electronics, it didn’t wait for the numbers to slump, it immediately started working on newer products.

It worked really hard to maintain the quality standard and never compromised on it even if the sales fluctuated.

Another major reason for Apple’s dominance in the upper crest of digital products is the customer relations it has maintained over the years. The brand loyalty that we see when it comes to Apple’s tribe is unmatched by any other company.

The user-friendly interface , attractive updates, and excellent customer service never let Apple’s presence fade away despite the extravagant costs.

Apple also works on its advertising strategy , launching exciting ads that ultimately make it the talk of the industry. Whether the reputation is positive or negative, Apple makes sure that it does not let the popularity descend. This constant adaptation and perseverance is what makes it sit on the trillion-dollar throne.

When was Apple founded?

Apple Computers, Inc. was founded on April 1, 1976 , by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

What is Apple's first product?

The first Apple product was launched on April 11, 1976. It was just a fully assembled motherboard, with about 60 chips.

Who is the CEO of Apple?

Tim Cook serves as CEO of Apple since 24 Aug 2011.

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Apple was founded as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1976 as a means to market and sell the Apple I desktop computer. The company mostly focused on selling computers into the 1990s, but everything changed when it released the iPod in 2001. That led to the release of the iPhone in 2007, and Apple is now known for manufacturing a range of different products.

For most of its history, Steve Jobs was the driving force behind Apple, but he passed away at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The company is now led by Tim Cook --  the first chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to publicly declare that he's gay -- who has been CEO since Jobs' passing in 2011 and has a different leadership style to Jobs .

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Apple's Name Comes From The Fruit

There have been lots of explanations given as to why the company is named Apple. However, the simple truth is that Apple is named after the fruit due to Steve Jobs' love of apples and fruit in general. Jobs considered himself a fruitarian, and followed a fruit-based diet for periods of his life -- including after he fell ill with pancreatic cancer. CNN reports that Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that the name sounded "fun, spirited and not intimidating," which made it a good fit for the fledgling company

According to Steve Wozniak, one of the two co-founders of Apple alongside Jobs, the name was inspired by Jobs' visit to an apple orchard in Oregon. However, Wozniak suggested that the apple orchard was "actually some kind of commune," according to Macworld . Regardless, that visit, and Jobs' love of fruit, inspired the name of a company that has now been around for several decades.

As an aside, Apple Inc. endured a years-long battle with Apple Corps, the holding company set up by The Beatles. Both companies were called Apple and both logos featured a profile of an apple, leading to a series of trademark disputes. This ended in 2007 when Apple Inc. acquired all of the trademarks related to Apple.

The Third Co-Founder Of Apple Sold His Stake For $800

While Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became household names as the founders of Apple, there was a third co-founder who opted out of the company early -- and lost billions of dollars by doing so.

Ronald Wayne worked at Atari alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, which meant he was involved in their early discussions about the company. He was older than Jobs and Wozniak, explaining to  NextShark that he was often seen as the "adult in the room". With Jobs and Wozniak often disagreeing on computing and business decisions, Wayne was given a 10% stake in the new company to act as a tie-breaker in the decision-making process. Wayne's contributions to Apple included drafting the original partnership agreement, creating the first logo featuring Sir Isaac Newton, and writing the Apple I operations manual.

Wayne exited the company days after forming it due to being somewhat risk-averse and not wholly convinced he was a fit for the business. He was later paid $800 to relinquish his 10% equity stake in the company. Those shares would now be worth many billions. However, Wayne has insisted that he doesn't regret exiting Apple, believing it was the correct decision based on the information he had at the time.

Apple Was The Third Company To Be Offered The iPod

While the iPod is synonymous with Apple, the idea was actually offered to two other companies first. Thankfully for Apple's sake, those two companies turned it down, whereas Steve Jobs saw the potential in the product which would set Apple off on a different, and very successful, path.

Tony Fadell was the brains behind the iPod. A former employee of both General Magic and Philips, Fadell had a vision to make a better MP3 player. He first approached RealNetworks with the idea of building a premium MP3 player with a better way of buying music. The company declined the offer. He then approached Philips, which also turned down the opportunity. Fadell then spoke to Apple, which decided to support his project. He was taken on as an independent contractor and led the team that built a prototype iPod. 

This product, which worked seamlessly with iTunes, was something of a game changer for Apple, with hundreds of millions of units sold. Beyond that, the iPod also led to the creation of the iPhone, which cemented Apple's position as a global brand which hasn't looked back since. Fadell stayed at Apple for almost a decade, and later, co-founded Nest Labs, which has since been acquired by Google .

The Apple I Sold For $666.66

Apple's first computer, the appropriately-named Apple I, was released in 1976, and it came with an odd price tag of $666.66. Not only would this be the equivalent of more than $3,000 in today's money, it was also a rather odd asking price. Especially as in Christianity, the number 666 is considered to be so-called the number of the beast, a euphemistic reference to the Antichrist or devil.

However, unlike some online conspiracy theories will attest, this had nothing to do with Satanic worship. Instead, Steve Wozniak has stated that the price point was decided on as he just preferred repeating digits. He has also stated that he had no idea of the relationship between the number and The Book of Revelation when coming up with the price.

As for why the Apple I cost that rough sum of money, it all comes down to profit margins. The wholesale price of the Apple I was $500, so $666 constituted a markup of 30 percent. The 66 cents on top of that wasn't important in any way except to catch people's eyes in advertisements. With the local computer store, The Byte Shop, agreeing to purchase 50 fully-assembled units for $500, the numbers all aligned.

Apple's First Logo Featured Sir Isaac Newton

Apple's logo has evolved over the decades that the company has been in business. However, the biggest change occurred between the first and second logos. The first logo, designed by the aforementioned Ronald Wayne in 1976, included an illustration of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. This is due to his association with an apple falling from a tree (and inspiring the discovery of gravity). The logo also features Apple Computer Co. on a banner wrapped around the drawing.

This logo only lasted for a year, with Steve Jobs deciding a rebrand was needed as early as 1977. He considered the first logo to be too old-fashioned and not easy to print on a smaller scale. So he hired Rob Janoff, an experienced designer, to design a new logo. That new logo was the profile of an apple with a bite taken out of it that we're all now achingly familiar with. The first version featured the colors of the rainbow, but that was consequently simplified further into single colors such as gray, silver, and white.

Apple Was The First Company To $1 Trillion

In 2018, Apple became the first private company to hit a market value of $1 trillion. This came 42 years after Apple was founded, and 117 years after US Steel became the first company to be valued at $1 billion in 1901. As amazing as Steve Jobs' tenure at Apple was -- especially after his return in 1997 -- it was his successor Tim Cook that led them to this monumental moment.

Apple's share price quadrupled between 2011 when Cook took over from Jobs after his resignation due to ill health. At the moment the price hit $207.05, Apple became the first $1 trillion private company in the world.

Some believe that PetroChina beat Apple to a $1 trillion market cap, but its valuation is considered unreliable due to only 2 percent of the company's shares being publicly traded. Either way, Apple now has a market cap north of $2 trillion, and at one point, it topped $3 billion. However, at the time of writing, it's only the second most valuable company in the world, with Apple's arch rival Microsoft holding the top spot.

Apple Fired Steve Jobs From The Company In 1985

Despite being the co-founder of the company, Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985. To rub salt into the wound, Jobs actually hired the man who would go onto fire him. That man was John Sculley, the CEO of PepsiCo, who was hired as CEO due to the board of directors not feeling that Jobs was ready for the job. Jobs was fired after falling out with the board of directors when two Apple products, the Macintosh and Lisa, failed to live up to expectations.

However, Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after the company acquired NeXT, the company Jobs launched after his ousting 12 years earlier. The board made Jobs CEO, and in that role, he went on to be instrumental in turning Apple's fortunes around.

Jobs stayed at the company from 1997 until his untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2011. At the point he passed away, Apple had become a world beater, with new and innovative products making it a household name, and even the Mac being a success. Meanwhile, the Lisa remains a footnote in the history of Apple .

Apple Is Wealthier Than All But A Handful Of Countries

Apple's astounding market cap (short for market capitalization) means it's wealthier than all but a handful of countries. A company's market cap represents its total value based on the outstanding shares of stock. Which makes it the closest thing we have to compare it with a country's GDP (gross domestic product).

The countries that Apple can be considered wealthier than change as both Apple's market caps and the GDPs of countries do, but the Cupertino-based company is consistently in the top 10. Which, given that there are around 195 countries in the world, is mightily impressive.

In January 2022, Apple became the first company to hit a market cap of $3 trillion. At that point, it was more valuable than all but the six largest economies in the world, including the U.S., China, and Germany, which means it beat big hitters such as France and Russia. Apple obviously isn't alone in this, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet being other companies that compete with entire countries for wealth. 

Steve Jobs Only Took A Salary Of $1 Per Year

For the decade plus change after he returned to the company, Steve Jobs only took a symbolic salary of $1 per year. This was despite pushing the company into new areas and increasing its stock price massively.

Opinions on why Jobs did this differ, with theories ranging from it was his way of showing how much he cared for the company he created to ensuring both he and his family could make use of Apple's health plan. However, the key is that Jobs didn't need to be paid a salary. He owned millions of shares in Apple, and they continued to grow in value throughout his tenure as CEO.

Jobs was one of the first CEOs to opt for a symbolic $1 salary, but he isn't alone in doing so. Other notable examples include Larry Ellison at Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, and Elon Musk at Tesla. The idea of taking a $1 per year salary dates back to World War I. The U.S. Government is forbidden from employing unpaid volunteers, so businessmen keen to help the war effort were given a nominal salary. This is how financier Bernard Baruch came to manage the War Industries Board for just $1 per year.

Apple Products Are Usually Pictured With A Time Of 9:41

Official images of Apple products almost always have the time set to 9:41. Once you notice it, you'll see it every time. But why 9:41am specifically?

This tradition dates back to 2007 and the reveal of Apple's iconic first iPhone . In a dress rehearsal of the keynote presentation, it was noted that the iPhone reveal would occur around 40 minutes in. And given that the presentation began at 9:00 am, that meant the iPhone would be revealed at around 9:40am. Add a minute or two in case of delays, and you get to 9:41.

Therefore, the promotional materials that would flash on screen behind Steve Jobs showed the iPhone with 9:41 as the time. Some early promotional images actually show 9:42, but 9:41 has become the standard for Apple ever since, despite new product reveals now happening at different times during keynote presentations.

The days of Jobs' using his signature "One more thing" line to reveal a surprise product at the end of presentations are long gone, but having 9:41 shown on the displays of new products with screens seems set in stone.

Read the original article on SlashGear

Every iPhone Generation: A Full History of Release Dates

Dive into the evolution of one of apples mobile phone..

The Apple iPhone is one of the most innovative inventions of the 21st century. To date, over 2.3 billion iPhones have been sold across the world. It's arguably one of the most revolutionary devices ever created. With 17 years since the first iPhone, it can be easy to get lost thinking about how many iPhone generations there have been. Apple released multiple iPhone lines in some years, and every year new phones are released regardless. Below, we've compiled every iPhone ever released in chronological order. With the latest iPhone being the iPhone 15, there's an extensive history to uncover from 2007 to 2024.

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How Many iPhone Generations Have There Been?

In total, there have been 23 different iPhone generations . The first iPhone debuted in 2007, and at least one new model has been released in each year following. This list counts separate models like the Plus or Max series with the mainline iPhone generation, but we did include new models like the iPhone SE 2 and the iPhone XR as separate entries.

How often do you get a new iPhone?

Every iPhone Generation in Order of Release

Iphone - june 29, 2007.

The revolutionary first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. Revealed as a device that was capable of iPod, Phone, and Internet functionalities, the iPhone marked the large first step in the smartphone market we know today. Apple made a huge departure from traditional cell phones, choosing to eliminate the keyboard and offer a digital option within the screen. With its 3.5-inch display and 2 megapixel embedded camera, the iPhone is a fun device to look back on as it changed the world of technology forever.

iPhone 3G - July 11, 2008

The second iPhone ever released was the iPhone 3G. This device brought 3G functionality to the iPhone, allowing for much faster speeds when utilizing cellular data. Additionally, this iPhone was the first to include the Apple App Store, which opened the door to developers creating applications for mobile phones.

iPhone 3GS - June 19, 2009

iPhone 3GS was the first iPhone to introduce a camera upgrade, with a new 3 megapixel camera on the back of the phone. This allowed for clearer pictures, further moving the smartphone into replacing traditional cameras. Additionally, new storage options were introduced to allow users to download more apps on the App Store. Performance overall was also claimed to be twice as fast as the iPhone 3G.

iPhone 4 - June 24, 2010

FaceTime was the star of the iPhone 4 , allowing for users to video call between devices from any given location. iPhone 4 featured a 5 megapixel camera, allowing for HD video capture for the first time. This camera also included an LED flash, which had not previously been available on the iPhone. Alongside these features, the iPhone 4 offered Apple's first Retina display, which sharpened the display to make text much more readable.

iPhone 4S - October 14, 2011

Most notably, the iPhone 4S is best known for the debut of Siri. The virtual assistant has gone on to be a staple of the Apple ecosystem, and it all started here. The iPhone 4S also featured 1080p video capture, thanks to its 8 megapixel onboard camera. Other major software like iCloud, iMessage, and more made their debut here on the iPhone 4S.

iPhone 5 - September 21, 2012

iPhone 5 was the first iPhone to support LTE technology, which created opportunities for large tasks and content to be available on cellular data. Audio was also a major focus, with new microphones added for crystal clear audio across both calls and FaceTime. This device was also the first iPhone to feature the Lightning port, a large departure from the previous 30-pin adapter.

iPhone 5S - September 20, 2013

The iPhone 5S marked the first appearance of Touch ID, a new technology that allowed you to unlock your iPhone by holding your finger against the home button. This became a staple in all future models up until the iPhone X. Alongside this feature, the iPhone 5S packed in the A7 processor and new camera technologies.

iPhone 5C - September 20, 2013

The iPhone 5C was Apple's first budget conscious iPhone. Released alongside the iPhone 5S, the 5C was made available in vibrant colors that caught the attention of anyone passing by. Internally, the device utilizing the same hardware as the iPhone 5 from 2012, so Apple was able to offer the 5C at a lower, more approachable price, making it one of the cheapest iPhones .

iPhone 6 - September 19, 2014

The iPhone 6 took a departure from the boxy design previously seen in the last three generations and offered a slimmed out device perfect for any pocket. Arguably, the biggest feature of the iPhone 6 was none other than Apple Pay, which was powered by NFC technology embedded inside the phone. This was also the first iPhone generation to introduce multiple models, with the iPhone 6 Plus offering a larger 5.5 inch screen.

iPhone 6S - September 25, 2015

The flagship feature of the iPhone 6S was 3D Touch, a technology that allowed the screen of the device to measure and take in different amounts of pressure. This allowed for multiple commands depending on how firmly you pressed against the screen, which led to new gestures all around. Additionally, the iPhone 6S was the first iPhone to have 4K video capabilities, which paved the way for iPhone to be used for filming.

iPhone SE - March 31, 2016

The iPhone SE (Special Edition) brought back the body style of the iPhone 5S and packed it with new, updated features. Capabilities from the iPhone 6S such as 4K video were included on the SE, offering a quality and compact option at a lower price point. This marked the first iPhone SE, with two more generations produced in the years following 2016.

iPhone 7 - September 16, 2016

iPhone 7 launched in Fall 2016 with a huge controversial twist - Apple decided to remove the headphone jack. This move shifted audio to either Bluetooth or through the Lightning port. This generation also added water resistance to the iPhone, in addition to a sturdy home button that utilized Apple's Taptic Engine for haptic feedback. Lastly, the iPhone 7 Plus was the first iPhone to offer a dual camera system.

iPhone 8 - September 22, 2017

iPhone 8 was largely the same design as the iPhone 7, with a few solid improvements to help the device stand out. First, wireless charging was added with a glass panel placed on the back of the iPhone. For the first time, you did not need to charge the phone through the Lightning port. Further, the iPhone 8 was the first phone to introduce the True Tone display. This display changes the colors and brightness of your device depending on your environmental surroundings.

iPhone X - November 3, 2017

The iPhone X was a huge departure from prior models, serving as the company's vision 10 years after the release of the original iPhone. The device made away with the home button, opting for a phone made entirely of just screen. New facial recognition technology called Face ID was revealed, which allowed users to unlock the iPhone X by directly looking at it. The iPhone X shaped all models that released after it, with each new iPhone utilizing a similar display and Face ID tech.

iPhone XS - September 21, 2018

The iPhone XS was a minimal improvement over the iPhone X, but there are some decent upgrades that future models benefitted from. Water resistance A largely overlooked new feature in the iPhone XS was the addition of a dual-SIM tray. This opened up the ability to load multiple SIM cards into one iPhone, which was a godsend for travelers overseas.

iPhone XR - October 26, 2018

The iPhone XR acted as 2018's budget friendly iPhone model. This device utilized a LCD display instead of the OLED display found on the iPhone X and iPhone XS. It also included only one camera on the back, similar to iPhone 8. Overall, the iPhone XR offered a similar experience to the premium iPhone X and iPhone XS at an affordable price point.

iPhone 11 - September 20, 2019

iPhone 11 increased the standard screen size across base models to 6.1 inches, moving from a Super Retina display to a Liquid Retina display. The device also opted for an Ultra Wide camera over the Telephoto camera found in prior dual camera models. The iPhone 11 was also the first generation to offer Pro models , which contained Super Retina displays, a triple camera setup, and HDR support.

iPhone SE (2nd Gen) - April 24, 2020

The iPhone SE 2 was a large improvement over the first SE model, with a new A13 Bionic chip that drastically improved performance. The screen size increased from 4 inches to 4.7 inches, with a True Tone display to offer the best picture quality no matter your environment. Additionally, Haptic Touch was added to the iPhone SE 2, as it was not present on the first model.

iPhone 12 - October 23, 2020

The iPhone 12 introduced MagSafe, a feature that allowed certain chargers and accessories to magnetically connect to the back of the iPhone. The base models received the Super Retina XDR display, providing a gorgeous OLED panel at an affordable price. iPhone 12 also added a Ceramic Shield, which proved to be tougher than glass and much more durable over time.

iPhone 13 - September 24, 2021

iPhone 13 brought massive leaps in battery life, with up to 19 hours of video playback. New features for photography were also introduced, like Cinematic Mode, which automatically focused on objects for perfect transitions every time. The iPhone 13 Pro models featured ProRes video, a type of capture that allowed for raw 4K30 videos.

iPhone SE (3rd Gen) - March 18, 2022

Released in the Spring of 2022, iPhone SE 3 brought back the home button for the first time in five years. Additionally, this model included 5G connectivity to take advantage of the new 5G towers that began popping up in 2021. Many of the photography features that were released in between the SE 2 and SE 3 were added to this model, including Night Mode, Photographic Styles, and more.

iPhone 14 - September 16, 2022

iPhone 14 brought new features like Emergency SOS, which utilizes Satellite connectivity to reach response teams in the event of an emergency. Additionally, the camera system across all models received sizable upgrades, such as improved ultrawide and zoom lenses. This generation also marked the return of the Plus model , a standard iPhone 14 with a larger screen.

iPhone 15 - September 22, 2023

The latest iPhone generation is none other than the iPhone 15 . Similar to the iPhone 14, a standard, Plus, Pro, and Pro Max model are all available to purchase. The biggest changes with this generation mostly occur with the Pro models, with a new lens, titanium frame, and action button to replace to mute switch. Of course, by far the biggest change is the switch from Lightning to USB-C, which was made due to new EU regulations.

When Is the iPhone 16 Coming Out?

Although we don't have exact details about the release of Apple's next flagship iPhone, Apple's release schedule has been consistent enough every year for us to make an educated guess. We expect the iPhone 16 to come out in the fall of 2024, most likely in September. We will likely learn more about the upcoming iPhone generation at Apple's WWDC event on June 10 this year. This is usually when Apple previews major updates to its various operating systems, including iOS.

Noah Hunter is a freelance writer and reviewer with a passion for games and technology. He co-founded Final Weapon, an outlet focused on nonsense-free Japanese gaming (in 2019) and has contributed to various publishers writing about the medium. His favorite series include Xeno and Final Fantasy.

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Apple uses a unique method to stream and present immersive video

A fisheye lens on an iPhone

Headsets providing VR and AR experiences often offer immersive video to users as well. This can take the form of Spatial Video, providing a 3D effect, but also 360-degree video that favors surrounding the viewer with content.

Apple has also released immersive video clips , namely 180-degree 3D video at high resolutions, though it is relatively slow to grow its content library at present.

To produce those videos, cameras with fisheye lenses are often used to produce an extremely wide angle shot, with multiple videos combined to make a single video.

The Apple Vision Pro does, naturally, have the capability to view fisheye content. However, while it is used to stream Apple TV+ videos, the format is largely undocumented and is unused by third parties.

In research by Mike Swanson published on Sunday, Apple's immersive video projection for users takes a different approach from more conventional fisheye formatting.

Differing distortions

Translating an image from a 2D video into a hemispherical or spherical projection map that's viewable from the user at the center isn't easy, but it is something that has practically been solved thanks to distortion.

A typical 180-degree out-of-camera fisheye shot that encompasses everything within the frame will appear as a circle, with black sections in the corners and edges of the circle referencing areas with no visual data available.

By segmenting the video up in a specific way, it can be stretched to fit a 180-degree field of view of the user, both horizontally and vertically within a virtual sphere. This is the simplest way of accomplishing a projection, but it isn't data-efficient due to the corner sections being part of the encoded video, but not actually being used in the final image.

An alternative that eliminates the black sections exists, in the form of an 180-degree equirectangular projection. Created via editing, it warps the image to fill the entire rectangular frame.

When distorted for viewing, this means more pixels are used for the edges of the projection map, meaning more detail for users to actually see.

To create stereoscopic video for each, or a 360-degree video, each 180-degree field of view is often squished into half the available space, allowing both sides to be included within the same frame.

For this scenario, which makes it harder to preserve details in each 180-degree view, warping out the image to the corners to eliminate wasted pixels makes sense.

Reality distortion effects

Swanson had trouble initially determining what Apple changed in its fisheye projection treatment, but did pull up some details about what was performed from monitoring the network traffic of his Apple Vision Pro.

From monitoring alone, he discovered streams were approximatly 50Mbps, encoded in HDR10, at a resolution of 4,320 by 4,320 per eye, at 90fps. However, since immersive videos were DRM-protected, Swanson couldn't view the raw fisheye frames without breaking it.

He was then alerted to the Apple TV+ intro clip of the logo using the same fisheye encoding, but without DRM. This allowed further analysis of Apple's fisheye format.

For a start, rather than using a single video frame to handle two eyes or front and back 180-degree projections, Apple instead encodes stereo video using MV-HEVC. In effect, each 180-degree projection is stored in a separate video layer within the video file.

More unusually, Apple encodes its fisheye content at a 45-degree rotation. The base of the "sphere" is located at the bottom left corner of the frame, with the top point at the opposite corner.

Swanson says this change makes sense, with one good reason being that the diagonal is the longest dimension of the frame and therefore can store more horizontal post-rotation pixels than an unrotated version.

To viewers, the advantage is that the horizon line will have the most pixels available. Since this is where most people will be looking while watching a video, preserving detail in this section is crucial to the viewing experience.

The areas with the fewest pixels to work with in a projection shifts from the middle of the top, bottom, and sides of a normal fisheye to the "corner" sections, which are feasibly less viewed.

Still some mysteries

Despite the additional information, Swanson hasn't cracked Apple's entire process, with some elements still eluding him.

One of these centers around a technique called Radial Stretching, where each degree of an image is stretched to the edge of a square frame, maximizing the usage of the entire frame for the image.

While Swanson has gotten close when processing a raw Apple fisheye frame, it's "not 100% correct." It is proposed that there are some additional logic elements at play along the diagonals to reduce the amount of radial stretching and distortion required, with Swanson's best guess being the use of simple beveled corners.

It's also offered that Apple could potentially be encoding to a specific geometry to add unnecessary complexity, making it harder for others to use the same format.

Swanson is still left with questions about why Apple uses this type of projection format. While Apple may find there are more benefits to doing so, they are still a mystery.

Encoding video for the Apple Vision Pro is just one of the challenges filmmakers face. In March, Canon executives explained that none of its cameras are capable of producing video at the resolution and refresh rate the headset requires.

If Apple is going to expand on how it treats video in the format, it may do so during WWDC 2024 in June .

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